Xenogears

  Ten thousand years ago, on a far away planet, there was a highly advanced civilization.  because of the population explosion, they had to build a colony ship and send people out to other inhabitable planets. The colony ship "Noah's Ark" was built. When it was sent up to space, a fatal incident took  place. The main computer was taken over by a certain "being" and turned against the crew on  board. Evacuation ships were shot down, and the captain was the only one left on board. Seeing  that the situation was completely hopeless, he made the Ark self-destruct. The ship crash-landed on a nearby planet. A mysterious woman survived the crash and rose up beside the wreckage.

Ten thousand years later, in a village called Rahan, we find the young Fei who is suffering from amnesia.

This is the beginning to Xenogears, one of Square's newest releases. The production of this game began around the same  time as Final Fantasy VII, so a lot of time has been spent on it. The production staff was pretty impressive, it's composed of people behind Chrono Trigger and the Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy series. With music by Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger) and anime scenes by Production IG, it seemed to be another top quality title from Square. Now that it's been released in Japan, does the game live up to the expectations? In my opinion, yes. In fact, it's even better than I had hoped for.

In the beginning of the production, Xenogears was meant to be the "opposite" of Final Fantasy VII (not my words, the producer said so himself). FFVII uses pre-rendered CG backgrounds with polygon characters, while Xenogears had real-time polygon backgrounds with 2D characters.

Xenogears is a very anime-looking game. All the significant characters have a face portrait showed up beside the dialogues (and there are MANY significant characters in this game). This is a very nice addition, which I think all other RPGs should have. The portraits look very nice. They certainly help you to be familiar with the characters. Overall, the character
design is excellent.

In the world of Xenogears, the people fight with huge mechas called gears. All your characters (with one exception) will have his/her own gear. As a mecha-fan, I'm glad to say that the gears are very good designed. In the beginning, you will only have a few gears, and the enemies' gears don't look very impressive either. But as you progress further in the game, they will look better and better. In the end, the gear-bosses and your characters' gears are just amazing.

Since the backgrounds are made of polygons, they can be rotated as you like. And they do look very impressive indeed. They are extremely detailed with tons of texture-mapping. And they move quite smoothly as well, not very much break-ups. But it tends to slow down a bit when a lot of things are going on, like when several gears show up together. But there's one bad thing about it. You can only rotate horizontally, not vertically. It can be frustrating sometimes, like when a building or other obstacles block your view. The characters also look a bit blocky, but that's something you will get used to after a while.

The control and gameplay are very good. Your characters can actually jump in Xenogears, which is kinda radical for a Square RPG. It makes the dungeons a lot more interesting and challenging. But it is the battle system which really deserves praise. Like other Final Fantasy games, the battles occur randomly, and they are turn-based. But the attacking is really fun this time. It uses a unique combo system, where you can combine different attacks yourself. Initially, you only have 3 APs (active points), and that doesn't give you many combos to play with. A weak attack takes 1 AP, a medium attack takes 2 APs, and a strong attack takes 3 APs. But as you level up and progress through the game, you can gain up to 7 APs. Then the fun really starts. Certain button combinations can activate your characters' special moves. They do tons of damage and are cool to watch, especially the last 7 AP skills. For once, the battles are actually fun! And of course, you can use gears in battles. You will need them for bigger enemies. You can't do combos with the gears, but they have special moves (which depends on how many skills the pilot has).

Also, later in the game, you are given the option to fight in some sort of a colosseum called Battling Ring. Here, you can choose a gear and fight against any other ones. There are many gears to choose, both yours and the enemies' gears. Here the control is different, you have direct control over your gear, like a fighting game. While it isn't anywhere near as good as Tobal2 or Tekken3, it's quite impressive as a mini-game in an RPG. Guess
if I was surprised when my Dual Shock analog controller started to rumble during a battling match! Xenogears supports the Dual Shock and it doesn't even say so in the package box! It's only supported in the Battling Ring, though (guess this is the first "fighting game" to support Dual Shock).

As for the anime scenes, they are very nice (it's from Prod. IG, they have to be good). But there aren't many of them, only for certain special events. There are some other CG FMV scenes, and they are awesome too. In VII, the FMVs are incorporated in the gamein a very nice way, the player wouldn't even notice when it changes from real-time playing to FMV scenes. But in Xenogears, the transition is not nearly as smooth. The result is that the anime scenes feel kinda seperated from the game.

Then we have the music. Xenogears' soundtrack is excellent (gee... I've run out of positive words). The music is generated from the PlayStation's soundcard, but sometimes, it sounds like Red Book format. There are many emotional tracks and they fit the events perfectly. Like when a new awesome gear is introduced to you, a kick-ass music track is played which really gets you in the fighting mood (I especially enjoyed that part where Maria decided to launch Siebzehn).

I've played many RPGs, and I've been impressed many times (mostly by Square games). So now, if an RPG impresses me, it has to have something really special. Xenogears may have good graphics, an enjoyable battle system and great character designs, but that's still not enough to impress me. But I spent 65 hours on this game, and once, I played it from 6 PM to 6 AM in the morning. I was totally in love with this game and ignored all my other duties. Why? Because Xenogears has the best storyline for an RPG ever!!

Yes, the story is absolutely fantastic. It's the best thing about Xenogears. Whoever wrote that story and planned the events deserve an award. At first, the story doesn't seem particularly interesting. But only after a few hours, after some special events and you will be totally addicted. Only small bits of the story is revealed at a time, and you will always want to know more and more. Things happen all the time. It kinda feels like the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The further your progression in the game, the more interesting it gets.

All in all, Xenogears is definitely the best RPG I've played so far.Awesome mechas, unique characters, original battle system and a fantastic storyline. There are some flaws, but nothing I would call serious. It just can't be recommended highly enough. But non-Japanese gamers beware, Xenogears emphasises heavily on the story. If you can't read the language, don't buy it. It won't be half as fun as it's meant to be.
 

Review Submitted By:
        geoff <[email protected]>